Matthew Eckelman
Northeastern University
Matthew Eckelman is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in Civil and Environmental Engineering, with secondary appointments in Chemical Engineering, Environmental Science, and Public Policy. His research interests include emissions modeling, life cycle assessment, and sustainable chemicals production. Dr. Eckelman has served on panels at the National Academies and NIST on sustainable manufacturing and industrial pollution issues and consults regularly on sustainability-related projects with a range of industrial companies and non-profit institutions. He was a co-recipient of the international Laudise Prize in Industrial Ecology in 2013 and was awarded an NSF CAREER award in environmental sustainability in 2015. He holds a BA in Physics and Mathematics from Amherst College and a doctorate in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from Yale, where he was affiliated with the Center for Industrial Ecology and the Center for Green Chemistry and Engineering.
A central goal of engineering ethics education is to provide students with an understanding of context for their designs and decisions, environmental and public health implications being central themes. In the United States,... [ view full abstract ]
A central goal of engineering ethics education is to provide students with an understanding of context for their designs and decisions, environmental and public health implications being central themes. In the United States, as in many countries, professional ethics training is a required topic in engineering curricula. Traditionally, ethics education has focused on cases where engineers consider the direct impacts of design decisions or of professional behavior. Numerous cases exist where students attempt to determine what constitutes bribery, or who is at fault when a product fails. Direct impacts of product failure can often be tracked to decisions about specific materials and components, but such decisions also have implications for indirect product impacts, for example from harmful emissions released during product manufacturing.
Such questions can be effectively discussed in the context of life cycle engineering, which is a design strategy that utilizes a comprehensive “cradle-to-grave” approach to evaluate environmental and social impacts, incorporating material, energy, and economic flows.
While the use of life cycle engineering and life cycle assessment (LCA) tools is widespread, the modeling structure and the interpretation of results involve ethical and value judgments that must be navigated carefully by the analyst and by the receiver of the results. LCA is increasingly important in corporate and government decision-making, yet there is a dearth of materials specifically designed to integrate ethics education into life cycle-oriented coursework. which may be even more important in safeguarding product safety. Over the past several years, as part of a multidisciplinary team from engineering, medicine/public health, public policy, and philosophy, we have developed a series of case studies and activities intended to teach students about the ethical dimensions of the decisions using a life cycle perspective. These cases focus on different product sectors (electronics, metals, health care, and others) and life cycle stages, in order to push students to reflect on questions of responsible engineering design both upstream and downstream of product use. The main intended audience for the cases are students in general engineering, medicine, and policy programs, but we have also used these cases to discuss ethical considerations for individuals and companies engaged in product life cycle assessment and/or management.
We will present each of the seven cases developed, as well as the accompanying general ethics materials, discuss how we deliver the cases in various classroom contexts, and present the results of our assessment of learning efficacy over several hundred students.
